Bosambo of the River

Keeping to the left bank, and moving only by night – they had reason for this – the adventurers followed the course of the stream which ordinarily was not on the map, and they were pardonably and almost literally at sea.

Two long nights they worked their crazy little steamer through an unknown territory without realising that it was unknown. They avoided such villages as they passed, shutting off steam and dowsing all lights till they drifted beyond sight and hearing.

At last they reached a stage in their enterprise where the maintenance of secrecy was a matter of some personal danger, and they looked around in the black night for assistance.

"Looks like a village over there, Jim," said Coulson, and the steersman nodded.

"There's shoal water here," he said grimly, "and the forehold is up to water-level."

"Leakin'?"

"Not exactly leakin'," said Jim carefully; "but there's no bottom to the forepart of this tub."

Coulson swore softly at the African night. The velvet darkness had fallen on them suddenly, and it was a case of tie-up or go on – Jim decided to go on.

They had struck a submerged log and ripped away the bottom of the tiny compartment that was magniloquently called "No. 1 hold"; the bulkhead of Nos. 1 and 2 was of the thinnest steel and was bulging perceptibly.

Coulson did not know this, but Jim did.

Now he turned the prow of the ancient steamer to the dark shore, and the revolving paddle-wheels made an expiring effort.

Somewhere on the river bank a voice called to them in the Akasava tongue; they saw the fires of the village, and black shadows passing before them; they heard women laughing.

Jim turned his head and gave an order to one of his naked crew, and the man leapt overboard with a thin rope hawser.

Then the ripped keel of the little boat took the sand and she grounded.

Jim lit his pipe from a lantern that hung in the deck cabin behind him, wiped his streaming forehead with the back of his hand, and spoke rapidly in the Akasava tongue to the little crowd who had gathered on the beach. He spoke mechanically, warning all and sundry for the safety of their immortal souls not to slip his hawser! warning them that if he lost so much as a deck rivet he would flay alive the thief, and ended by commending his admiring audience to M'shimba M'shamba, Bim-bi, O'kili, and such local devils as he could call to his tongue. "That's let me out," he said, and waded ashore through the shallow water as one too much overcome by the big tragedies of life to care very much one way or another whether he was wet or dry.

He strode up the shelving beach and was led by a straggling group of villagers to the headman's hut to make inquiries, and came back to the boat with unpleasant news.

Coulson had brought her nose to the sand, and by a brushwood fire that the men of the village had lit upon the beach, the damage was plainly to be seen.

The tiny hull had torn like brown paper, and part of the cause – a stiff branch of gun-wood – still protruded from the hole.

"We're in Sanders's territory, if it's all the same to you," said Jim gloomily. "The damnation old Frenchi river is in spruit and we've come about eighty miles on the wrong track."

Coulson, kneeling by the side of the boat, a short, black briar clutched between his even white teeth, looked up with a grin.

"'Sande catchee makee hell,'" quoted he. "Do you remember the Chink shaver who used to run the Angola women up to the old king for Bannister Fish?"

Jim said nothing. He took a roll of twist from his pocket, bit off a section, and chewed philosophically.

"There's no slavery outfit in this packet," he said. "I guess even old man Fish wouldn't fool 'round in this land – may the devil grind him for bone-meal!"

There was no love lost between the amiable adventurers and Mr. Bannister Fish. That gentleman himself, sitting in close conference with Ofesi not fifty miles from whence the Grasshopper lay, would have been extremely glad to know that her owners were where they were.

"Fish is out in these territories for good," said Jim; "but it'll do us no good – our not bein' Fish, I mean, if Sandi comes nosing round lookin' for traders' licences – somehow I don't want anybody to inspect our cargo."

Coulson nodded as he wielded a heavy hammer on the damaged plate.

"I guess he'll know all right," Jim went on. "You can't keep these old lokalis quiet – listen to the joyous news bein', so to speak, flashed forth to the expectant world."

Coulson suspended his operations. Clear and shrill came the rattle of the lokali tapping its message:

"Tom-te tom, tom-te tom, tommitty tommitty tommitty-tom."

"There she goes," said the loquacious Jim, complacently. "Two white men of suspicious appearance have arrived in town – Court papers please copy."

Coulson grinned again. He was working his hammer deftly, and already the offending branch had disappeared.

"A ha'porth of cement in the morning," he said, "and she's the Royal yacht."

Jim sniffed.

"It'll take many ha'porths of cement to make her anything but a big intake pipe," he said. He put his hand on the edge of the boat and leapt aboard. Abaft the deck-house were two tiny cupboards of cabins, the length of a man's body and twice his width. Into one of these he dived, and returned shortly afterwards with a small, worn portmanteau, patched and soiled. He jumped down over the bows to the beach, first handing the piece of baggage down to the engineer of the little boat. It was so heavy that the man nearly dropped it.

"What's the idea?" Coulson mopped the sweat from his forehead with a pocket-handkerchief, and turned his astonished gaze to the other.

"'Tis the loot," said Jim significantly. "We make a cache of this to-night lest a worse thing happen.

"Oh, God, this man!" prayed Coulson, appealing heavenward. "With the eyes of the whole dam' barbarian rabble directed on him, he stalks through the wilderness with his grip full of gold and his heart full of innocent guile!"

Jim refilled his pipe leisurely from a big, leather pouch that hung at his waist before he replied. "Coulson," he said between puffs, "in the language of that ridiculous vaudeville artiste we saw before we quit London, you may have brains in your head, but you've got rabbit's blood in your feet. There's no occasion for getting scared, only I surmise that one of your fellow-countrymen will be prowling around here long before the bows of out stately craft take the water like a thing of life, and since he is the Lord High Everything in this part of the world, and can turn out a man's pocket without so much as a 'damn ye,' I am for removing all trace of the Frenchi Creed River diggings."

Coulson had paused in his work, and sat squatting on his heels, his eyes fixed steadily on his partner's. He was a good-looking young man of twenty-seven, a few years the junior of the other, whose tanned face was long and thin, but by no means unpleasant.

"What does it matter?" asked Coulson after a while. "He can only ask where we got the dust, and we needn't tell him; and if we do we've got enough here to keep us in comfort all our days."

Jim smiled.

"Suppose he holds this gold?" he asked quietly. "Suppose he just sends his spies along to discover where the river digging is – and suppose he finds it is in French territory and that there is a prohibitive export duty from the French country. Oh! there's a hundred suppositions, and they're all unpleasant."

Coulson rose stiffly.

"I think we'll take the risk of the boat foundering, Jim," he said. "Put the grip back."

Jim hesitated, then with a nod he swung the portmanteau aboard and followed. A few minutes later he was doubled up in the perfectly inadequate space of No. 1 hold, swabbing out the ooze of the river, and singing in a high falsetto the love song of a mythical Bedouin.

It was past midnight when the two men, tired, aching, and cheerful, sought their beds.

"If Sanders turns up," shouted Jim as he arranged his mosquito curtain (the shouting was necessary, since he was addressing his companion through a matchboard partition between the two cabins), "you've got to lie, Coulson."

"I hate lying," grumbled Coulson loudly; "but I suppose we shall have to?"

"Betcher!" yawned the other, and said his prayers with lightning rapidity.

Daylight brought dismay to the two voyagers.

The hole in the hull was not alone responsible for the flooded hold. There was a great gash in her keel – the plate had been ripped away by some snag or snags unknown. Coulson looked at Jim, and Jim returned the despairing gaze.

"A canoe for mine," said Jim after a while. "Me for the German river and so home. That is the way I intended moving, and that is the way I go."

Coulson shook his head.

"Flight!" he said briefly. "You can explain being in Sanders's territory, but you can't explain the bolt – stick it out!"

All that morning the two men laboured in the hot sun to repair the damage. Fortunately the cement was enough to stop up the bottom leak, and there was enough over to make a paste with twigs and sun-dried sand to stop the other. But there was no blinking the fact that the protection afforded was of the frailest. The veriest twig embedded in a sandbank would be sufficient to pierce the flimsy "plating." This much the two men saw when the repairs were completed at the end of the day. The hole in the bow could only be effectively dealt with by the removal of one plate and the substitution of another, "and that," said Jim, "can hardly happen."

The German river was eighty miles upstream and a flooded stream that ran five knots an hour at that. Allow a normal speed of nine knots to the tiny Grasshopper, and you have a twenty hours' run at best.

"The river's full of floatin' timber," said Jim wrathfully, eyeing the swift sweep of the black waters, "an' we stand no better chance of gettin' anywhere except to the bottom; it's a new plate or nothing."

Thus matters stood with a battered Grasshopperhigh and dry on the shelving beach of the Akasava village, and two intrepid but unhappy gold smugglers discussing ways and means, when complications occurred which did much to make the life of Mr. Commissioner Sanders unbearable.

* * * * *

There was a woman of the Akasava who bore the name of Ufambi, which means a "bad woman." She had a lover – indeed, she had many, but the principal was a hunter named Logi. He was a tall, taciturn man, and his teeth were sharpened to two points. He was broad-shouldered, his hair was plastered with clay, and he wore a cloak that was made from the tails of monkeys. For this reason he was named Logi N'kemi, that is to say, Logi the Monkey.

He had a hut far in the woods, three days' journey, and in this wood were several devils; therefore he had few visitors.

Ufambi loved this man exceedingly, and as fervently hated her husband, who was a creature of Ofesi. Also, he was not superior to the use of the stick.

One day Ufambi annoyed him and he beat her. She flew at him like a wild cat and bit him, but he shook her off and beat her the more, till she ran from the hut to the cool and solitary woods, for she was not afraid of devils.

Here her lover found her, sitting patiently by the side of the forest path, her well-moulded arms hugging her knees, her chin sunk, a watchful, brooding and an injured woman.

They sat together and talked, and the woman told him all there was to be told, and Logi the Monkey listened in silence.

"Furthermore," she went on, "he has buried beneath the floor of the hut certain treasures given to him by white men, which you may take."

She said this pleadingly, for he had shown no enthusiasm in the support of her plan.

"Yet how can I kill your husband," said Logi, carefully, "and if I do kill him and Sandi comes here, how may I escape his cruel vengeance? I think it would be better if you gave him death in his chop, for then none would think evilly of me."

She was not distressed at his patent selfishness. It was understandable that a man should seek safety for himself, but she had no intention of carrying out her lover's plan.

She returned to her husband, and found him so far amiable that she escaped a further beating. Moreover, he was communicative.

"Woman," he said, "to-morrow I go a long journey because of certain things I have seen, and you go with me. In a secret place, as you know, I have hidden my new canoe, and when it is dark you shall take as much fish and my two little dogs and sit in the canoe waiting for me."

"I will do this thing, lord," she said meekly.

He looked at her for a long time.

"Also," he said after a while, "you shall tell no man that I am leaving, for I do not desire that Sandi shall know, though," he added, "if all things be true that Ofesi says, he will know nothing."

"I will do this as you tell me, lord," said the woman.

He rose from the floor of the hut where he had been squatting and went out of the hut.

"Come!" he said graciously, and she followed him to the beach and joined the crowd of villagers who watched two white men labouring under difficulties.

By and by she saw her husband detach himself from the group and make his cautious way to where the white men were.

Now Bikilari – such was the husband's name – was a N'gombi man, and the N'gombi folk are one of two things, and more often than not, both. They are either workers in iron or thieves, and Jim, looking up at the man, felt a little spasm of satisfaction at the sight of the lateral face marks which betrayed his nationality.

"Ho, man!" said Jim in the vernacular, "what are you that you stand in my sun?"

"I am a poor man, lord," said Bikilari, "and I am the slave of all white men: now I can do things which ignorant men cannot, for I can take iron and bend it by heat, also I can bend it without heat, as my fathers and my tribe have done since the world began."

Coulson watched the man keenly, for he was no lover of the N'gombi.

"Try him out, Jim," he said, so they gave Bikilari a hammer and some strips of steel, and all the day he worked strengthening the rotten bow of the Grasshopper.

In the evening, tired and hungry, he went back to his hut for food; but his wife had watched him too faithfully for his comfort, and the cooking-pot was cold and empty. Bikilari beat her with his stick, and for two hours she sobbed and blew upon the embers of the fire alternately whilst my lord's fish stewed and spluttered over her bent head.

* * * * *

Jim was a good sleeper but a light one. He woke on the very smell of danger. Here was something more tangible than scent – a dog-like scratching at his door. In the faint moonlight he saw a figure crouching in the narrow alley-way, saw, too, by certain conformations, that it was a woman, and drew an uncharitable conclusion. Yet, since she desired secrecy, he was willing to observe her wishes. He slid back the gauze door and flickered an electric lamp (most precious possession, to be used with all reserve and economy). She shrank back at this evidence of magic and breathed an entreaty.

"What do you want?" he asked in a low voice.

"Lord," she answered, her voice muffled, "if you desire your life, do not stay here."

Jim thrust his face nearer to the woman's.

"Say what you must say very quickly," he said.

"Lord," she began again, "my husband is Bikilari, a worker in iron. He is the man of Ofesi, and to-night Ofesi sends his killers to do his work upon all white men and upon all chiefs who thwart him. Also upon you because you are white and there is treasure in your ship."

"Wait," said Jim, and turned to tap on Coulson's door. There was no need. Coulson was out of bed at the first sound of whispering and now stood in the doorway, the moonlight reflected in a cold blue line on the revolver he held in his hand.

"It may be a fake – but there's no reason why it should be," he said when the story was told. "We'll chance the hole in the bow."

Jim ran forward and woke the sleeping engineer, and came back with the first crackle of burning wood in the furnace.

He found the woman waiting.

"What is your name?" he asked.

She stood with her back to the tiny rail, an easy mark for the man who had followed her and now crouched in the shadow of the hull. He could reach up and touch her. He slipped out his long N'gombi hunting knife and felt the point.

"Lord," said the woman, "I am – "

Then she slipped down to the deck.

Coulson fired twice at the fleeing Bikilari, and missed him. Logi, the lover, leapt at him from the beach but fell before a quick knife-thrust.

Bikilari reached the bushes in safety and plunged into the gloom – and into the arms of Ahmed Ali, a swift, silent man, who caught the knife arm in one hand and broke the neck of the murderer with the other – for Ahmed Ali was a famous wrestler in the Kono country.

The city was aroused, naked feet pattered through the street. Jim and Coulson, lying flat on the bow of the steamer, held the curious at bay.

Two hours they lay thus whilst the cold boilers generated energy. Then the paddle wheel threshed desperately astern, and the Grasshopper dragged herself to deep water.

A figure hailed them from the bank in Swaheli.

"Lord," it said, "go you south and meet Sandi – northward is death, for the Isisi are up and the Akasava villagers are in their canoes – also all white men in this land are dead, save Sandi."

"Who are you?" megaphoned Jim, and the answer came faintly as the boat drifted to mid-stream.

"I am Ahmed Ali, the servant of Sandi, whom may God preserve!"

"Come with us!" shouted Jim.

The figure on the bank, clear to be seen in his white jellab, made a trumpet of his hands.

"I go to kill one Ofesi, according to orders – say this to Sandi."

Then the boat drifted beyond earshot.

"Up stream or down?" demanded Jim at the wheel. "Down we meet Sanders and up we meet the heathen in his wrath."

"Up," said Coulson, and went aft to count noses.

That night died Iliki, the chief of the Isisi, and I'mini, his brother, stabbed as they sat at meat, also Bosomo of the Little Isisi, and B'ramo of the N'gomi, chiefs all; also the wives and sons of B'ramo and Bosomo; Father O'Leary of the Jesuit Mission at Mosankuli, his lay minister, and the Rev. George Galley, of the Wesleyan Mission at Bogori, and the Rev. Septimus Keen and his wife, at the Baptist Mission at Michi.

Bosambo did not die, because he knew; also a certain headman of Ofesi knew – and died.

Ofesi had planned largely and well. War had come to the territories in the most terrible form, yet Bosambo did not hesitate, though he was aware of his inferiority, not only in point of numbers, but in the more important matter of armament.

For the most dreadful thing had happened, and pigeons flying southward from a dozen points carried the news to Sanders – for the first time in history the rebellious people of the Akasava were armed with rifles – rifles smuggled across the border and placed in the hands of Ofesi's warriors.

The war-drum of the Ochori sounded. At dawn Bosambo led forty war canoes down the river, seized the first village that offered resistance and burnt it. He was for Ofesi's stronghold, and was half-way there when he met the tiny Grasshopper coming up stream.

At first he mistook it for the Zaire and made little effort to disclose the pacific intentions of his forty canoes, but a whistling rifle bullet aimed precisely made him realise the danger of taking things for granted.

He paddled forward alone, ostentatiously peaceable, and Jim received him.

"Rifles?" Coulson was incredulous. "O chief, you are mad!"

"Lord," said Bosambo earnestly, "let Sandi say if I be mad – for Sandi is my bro – is my master and friend," he corrected himself.

Jim knew of Bosambo – the chief enjoyed a reputation along the coast, and trusted him now.

He turned to his companion.

"If all Bosambo says is true there'll be hell in this country," he said quietly. "We can't cut and run. Can you use a rifle?" he asked.

Bosambo drew himself up.

"Suh," he said in plain English, "I make 'um shoot plenty at Cape Coast Cassell – I shoot 'um two bulls' eyes out."

Coulson considered.

"We'll cashee that gold," he said. "It would be absurd to take that with us. O Bosambo, we have a great treasure, and this we will leave in your city."

"Lord," said Bosambo quietly, "it shall be as my own treasure."

"That's exactly what I don't want it to be," said Coulson.

The fleet waited whilst Bosambo returned to Ochori city with the smugglers; there, in Bosambo's hut, and in a cunningly-devised hole beneath the floor, the portmanteau was hidden and the Grasshopper went joyfully with the stream to whatever adventures awaited her.

* * * * *

The moonlight lay in streaks of sage and emerald green – such a green as only the moon, beheld through the mists of the river, can show. Sage green for shadow, bright emerald on the young spring verdure, looking from light to dark or from dark to light, as the lazy breezes stirred the undergrowth. In the gleam of the moonlight there was one bright, glowing speck of red – it was the end of Mr. Commissioner Sanders's cigar.

He sat in the ink-black shadow cast by the awning on the foredeck of the Zaire. His feet, encased in long, pliant mosquito boots that reached to his knees, rested on the rail of the boat, and he was a picture of contentment and cheerful idleness.

An idle man might be restless. You might expect to hear the creak of the wicker chair as he changed his position ever so slightly, yet it is a strange fact that no such sound broke the pleasant stillness of the night.

He sat in silence, motionless. Only the red tip of the cigar glowed to fiery brightness and dulled to an ashen red as he drew noiselessly at his cheroot.

A soft felt hat, pulled down over his eyes, would have concealed the direction of his gaze, even had the awning been removed. His lightly clasped hands rested over one knee, and but for the steady glow of the cigar he might have been asleep.

Yet Sanders of the River was monstrously awake. His eyes were watching the tousled bushes by the water's edge, roving from point to point, searching every possible egress.

There was somebody concealed in those bushes – as to that Sanders had no doubt. But why did they wait – for it was a case of "they" – and why, if they were hostile, had they not attacked him before?

Sanders had had his warnings. Some of the pigeons came before he had left headquarters; awkwardly scrawled red labels had set the bugles ringing through the Houssa quarters. But he had missed the worst of the messages. Bosambo's all-Arabic exclamation had fallen into the talons of a watchful hawk – poor winged messenger and all.

Sanders rose swiftly and silently. Behind him was the open door of his cabin, and he stepped in, walked in the darkness to the telephone above the head of his bunk and pressed a button.

Abiboo dozing with his head against the buzzer answered instantly.

"Let all men be awakened," said Sanders in a whisper. "Six rifles to cover the bush between the two dead trees."

"On my head," whispered Abiboo, and settled his tarboosh more firmly upon that section of his anatomy.

Sanders stood by the door of his cabin, a sporting Lee-Enfield in the crook of his arm, waiting.

Then from far away he heard a faint cry, a melancholy, shrill whoo-wooing. It was the cry that set the men of the villages shuddering, for it was such a cry as ghosts make.

Men in the secret service of Sanders, and the Government also, made it, and Sanders nodded his head.

Here came a man in haste to tell him things.

A long pause and "Whoo-woo!" drearily, plaintively, and nearer. The man was whooing then at a jog-trot, and they on the bank were waiting —

"Fire!" cried Sanders sharply.

Six rifles crashed like a thunderclap, there was a staccato flick-flack as the bullets struck the leaves, and two screams of anguish.

Out of the bush blundered a dark figure, looked about dazed and uncertain, saw the Zaire and raised his hand.

Bang!

A bullet smacked viciously past Sanders's head.

"Guns!" said Sanders with a gasp, and as the man on the bank rattled back the lever of his repeater, Sanders shot him.